Donovan: Don't let DOJ "dox" its own FBI agents.
A New Haven and Bridgeport law firm has catapulted into the thick of a nationwide effort to halt the Trump administration’s purging of the executive branch and retaliation against career federal officials who investigated the president and Jan. 6 rioters.
Attorneys from the Connecticut plaintiff’s office Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, which has a New Haven office located at the intersection of Elm and State streets, are now going toe-to-toe with Trump admin lawyers in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
They represent seven anonymous FBI agents and the bureau’s 14,000-plus-member agents association who last Tuesday sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) over a 12-question survey the department circulated on Sunday, Feb. 2, asking agents to identify their involvement in Jan. 6 investigations by 3 p.m. the next day.
The point of the survey, argues the lawsuit, which is one of two filed on Feb. 4 against the DOJ, is to cull about 6,000 agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases from the bureau and disseminate their names to the public. Koskoff’s Chris Mattei and Margaret Donovan, both career prosecutors and DOJ alums, learned of the survey soon after it went out and sprung into action as pro hac vice counsel, allowing them to represent clients outside of their usual jurisdiction. (Donovan is also a lecturer at Yale Law School.)
The petition, filed with Washington D.C.-based lawyers Mark S. Zaid and Norman L. Eisen, argues, among other things, that the DOJ violated the Privacy Act, a federal law passed in 1974 to protect the sensitive information of U.S. government employees from public disclosure. It also includes constitutional reasoning rooted in the First Amendment, alleging that the department is poised to retaliate against its members “based on perceived political affiliation.”
The agents scored a short-term win last Friday as Judge Jia Cobb of the D.C. District Court issued a consent order barring the DOJ from releasing the names of the survey respondents without providing two days’ notice to their attorneys, giving them enough time to seek a temporary restraining order blocking any further action from the department.
“The goal of the consent order, as totally insane as this sounds, was to prevent the Department of Justice from doxing its own FBI agents,” Donovan told the Independent. “And the idea that we had to go to a federal district court to get the Department of Justice to agree to that should be really concerning to everybody who’s thinking about the rule of law right now.”
Donovan and Mattei and the DOJ will brief the court in the next two weeks and meet in D.C. next month for oral arguments, slated for March 27. The consent order will remain in place until then, unless the DOJ moves to release the names sooner, which would likely trigger a temporary restraining order shielding the names again until the court date.